


Asteria

by Anythingtoasted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fallen Angels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:17:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anythingtoasted/pseuds/Anythingtoasted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire Novak; an "aftermath" fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asteria

“What’re you drawing, honey?” her mother leans over the paper, but Claire covers it with a hand.

Beneath her fingers the colours splay; soft blue, white-gold, a twist and a swirl, all carefully daubed out in soft crayon. But her mother won’t like it if she tells the truth, if she says  _an angel,_ so instead she says,“The sky.”

She loses all her friends in 2008, because no one wants to talk to the girl who spends hours staring out of the window, eyes blank and listless. They know her dad is away, know he went somewhere (and some say he’s got another family now, another little girl; some say he died, and Claire; Claire doesn’t know what happened, only that he’s not here) – but they don’t ask, and when she speaks they look at her as if a china doll has come to life, and they don’t listen to the words.

Her mother sends her to a counsellor when she’s fifteen, after she finds her trying to climb out of her bedroom window. She cries, and Claire stares at her; the counsellor asks her things in a gentle voice, but none of it makes any sense.

“Do you miss your father, Claire?”

How can she explain?  _No, I don’t miss him,_ she can’t say,  _I miss his friend._

She can’t explain how he was in her, every part of her, fingertips to the roots of her hair; how he filled her up and she felt  _magic,_ gilded from the inside, burned gold all the way through, so that light seemed to burst from her skin.

So that, years after, she could still feel the residue slicked around her bones.

She can’t say that she knows it now, knows it all; how the universe was birthed, how it grew; what it felt like to kill, to torture; to be tortured in return. She can’t say how it felt to feel the power and fury and love of a hundred thousand worlds, bunched up under her skin, white-hot. How it felt, the loss, the  _grief,_ when it poured out again.

She can’t talk about how sometimes she feels as if she’s spilling over; the lack of control, the lack of  _destiny,_ crushing her tiny bones.

How she wishes her father had never ‘saved’ her, because being saved should feel like _that,_ not  _this._

She can’t say any of it so she says nothing at all, and that only makes her mother worse.

When she’s seventeen she learns; she gets quiet, she smiles, she stays in school. Stays up all night, alone, as well, and goes to parties though the sensation of alcohol, of sweet smoke, is nothing like the smoke that once sluiced against her every pore.

She dreams the things he knew, the things he saw; thousands of babies dying in Egypt, the rush of a hundred thousand floods. The hot, thick spurt of blood over her hands,  _his_ hands,though he had no hands to speak of; though he had no arms, either.

She talks to him, to the angel, but she doesn’t know if he hears.

Her friends think she’s a little weird, a little interesting; they laugh when she’s buzzed, and ‘gets biblical’.

One night, lying in a cornfield, facing the sky, she curls her hand around the wrist of her friend, and says, “Do you believe in angels?”

Her friend rolls over and kisses her, and that would be the end of it, but Claire pulls away and looks at her. She says, “I knew one,” and her friend laughs and tries to kiss her again, but Claire twists away from her hands.

“Are you okay?”

In the darkness her friend looks like a monster, and Claire’s heart is pounding in her chest. “No, no, no,” she murmurs, over and over, and her friend reaches for her shoulder, but her hand falters when the world is set ablaze.

A fire crashes down in the field; then another, on the horizon, another, smashing into a barn; the corn goes up like it was kindling, and Claire’s world turns swiftly orange before her eyes, the stink rising high, streaming into her nose, making her eyes water. It is like when he entered her, almost; a thick rush of power and fog; but instead she feels no joy, no starlight. Just the thin whine of a headache starting; the dim pressure of her friend, scrabbling at her arms, shouting her name against her ear.

They run, bare feet torn and bleeding from the ground, shoes discarded; her friend’s hand slips against her wrist, and Claire lets her run on. She turns her face towards the sky.

Angels are falling, and they don’t look like her angel, don’t feel like him, but she’d know them anywhere.

She stands in the cornfield as the fire spreads; tilts her face towards the sky, which is lit now with a hundred thousand falling stars.

“Take me,” she breathes, like she always planned it. She throws her arms out, palms wide; opens her eyes, opens her mouth, and screams it, “Take me!” like they’ll listen.

The lights keep falling in silence, crackle and crash.

She thinks,  _fuck you, damn you,_ like she has, time and again; but the cornfield is on fire and somehow it galvanizes her, lets her  _breathe._

She picks a light in the sky, straightens her shoulders, and sets off running to meet it.

 


End file.
